partition fixing

[Adam Hawes]

>   By the sounds of things it is possible that the dd did not 
> complete properly
>   - possibly aborting due to errors. As mentioned previously 
> by another poster
>   you could add the conv=noerror,sync to ensure it does not 
> quit half way.

You'll be better off with one of the other more sophisticated
tools (dd_rescue).  At least they skip dead blocks immediately
and then go back and try to recover the bad blocks when they are 
done.  That means you extract the data from the working sectors 
as quickly as  possible and if the disk is progressively getting 
worse you don't risk losing as much data.

dd_rescue also uses large block sizes for its reads to improve 
performance and drops back to really small ones when it detects 
a failure so as to extract the most data from the disk.

A